Creating WordPress Websites

DETAILS

Learn how to create attractive, sophisticated blogs and websites—without any coding! WordPress is the world's most popular website publisher, powering more than 25% of all sites on the Internet. WordPress is an easy-to-use solution that will help you put your site on the Web in far less time than by coding, and at a much lower cost than hiring a professional.

In these lessons, you'll get hands-on experience with this powerful tool as you create your own WordPress.org site and blog. You'll find out how to use WordPress to create pages and posts, add images and videos, change a site's look and feel, and include user-friendly features. You'll discover the ease of using WordPress design themes to express your creativity, and you'll see how much fun it is to be part of the vibrant WordPress online community.

In addition to mastering the technical elements of WordPress, you'll learn how to organize a blog or website, create appealing content, keep your site secure, and achieve better positions on search engine results pages. By the end of this course, you'll be able to confidently use WordPress to create a blog or a personal, business, or organizational website.

The WordPress.org version covered in this class is the platform the pros use. While it normally requires a paid hosting account, this course includes a totally free, no obligation SiteGround hosting account for three months, along with a private place on the Web for practice.

Course Revised June 2016

SYLLABUS

A new session of each course opens each month, allowing you to enroll whenever your busy schedule permits!

How does it work? Once a session starts, two lessons will be released each week, for the six-week duration of your course. You will have access to all previously released lessons until the course ends.

Keep in mind that the interactive discussion area for each lesson automatically closes 2 weeks after each lesson is released, so you’re encouraged to complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The Final Exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the Final Exam has been released, you will have 2 weeks plus 10 days to complete the Final and finish any remaining lessons in your course. No further extensions can be provided beyond these 10 days.

Week 1

Lesson 01 - Getting Started With WordPress

Wednesday

In this first lesson, we'll explore the magic of WordPress! You'll discover how to use this WordPress to create an attractive, dynamic blog or website—without learning any special code. You'll find out what the two "flavors" of WordPress are and why we'll use the self-hosted WordPress.org version. Then you'll go online, sign up for a free hosting account, and tour the WordPress Dashboard.

Lesson 02 - Creating a Blog

Friday

What can a blog do that a website can't? Blogging's become a popular way to establish an online presence. We'll discuss how adding a blog can make a traditional website more effective. Then you'll build a blog with WordPress—by creating, refining, and categorizing posts. You'll also find out how to encourage and control visitor feedback.

Week 2

Lesson 03 - Making a WordPress Website

Wednesday

Get the best of both worlds by combining a blog with a traditional website. In this lesson, you'll use WordPress to create and organize Web pages. And I'll show you how to convert your blog to a traditional website—or vice versa—with the click of a button.

Lesson 04 - Making Your Pages Look Great

Friday

This lesson's all about WordPress themes—the templates that give your website its look and feel. You'll discover how to choose a theme, install it, and tweak it.

Week 3

Lesson 05 - Working With Images and Multimedia

Wednesday

Photos, drawings, charts, videos, and audio clips can make your website more appealing and understandable. In this lesson, I'll show you how to use WordPress to upload and insert images and multimedia files.

Lesson 06 - Plugins: The Modular Solution for Functional Websites

Friday

Plugins are little programs that add features to your WordPress website. In this lesson, you'll learn how to find and use them.

In this lesson, we'll take a long, hard look at our class project and decide how to make it better. You'll create a front page featuring both static and dynamic content; add links to pages, documents, email, and other sites; and repair typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes.

Week 5

Lesson 09 - Getting Search Engines to Love Your Website

Wednesday

What if you launched a website and nobody came? This lesson will show you how to keep that from happening. You'll find out what makes search engines tick and how to get them to visit your pages.

Lesson 10 - Making the Most of Statistics and Social Networking

Friday

Statistics are just a bunch of numbers if you don't know how to use them. We'll focus on how to analyze stats so you can improve your site. You'll also find out how to tie your WordPress pages into social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Week 6

Lesson 11 - WordPress Security and Monetization

Wednesday

In this lesson, we'll discuss how you can protect a WordPress site against hackers, and we'll review money-making strategies for blogs and websites.

Lesson 12 - Mastering Your Domains

Friday

In our final lesson, we'll tour the hosting control panel, discuss domain naming strategies, and review where to get help after the course ends.

No software purchase or installation is necessary. WordPress.org requires a paid hosting account, which normally costs around $8/month. Included in the course is a free 90-day hosting account (US only) and temporary domainwith SiteGround, one of the world's most respected hosts. You'll receive instructions for registering for and accessing your free account. WordPress runs on any Windows operating system from Windows Vista to Windows 10 and on all versions of Mac OS X. No specific knowledge or skills are required, just a general familiarity with the Internet.

INSTRUCTOR

John Agress has been active in the computer world since the 1980s and has been developing and designing websites for more than a decade. He was among the first designers to recognize that WordPress, which was originally created as blogging software, can also produce content management websites that can be updated as easily as sending an email. He loves helping his Web design clients take control of their WordPress blogs and websites. John graduated from Northwestern University with a B.S. in Communication Studies and spent many years as a radio and television news anchor, writer, and producer.

REVIEWS

This is my 4th ed2go course and John was by far the most responsive instructor to date. He spends the time to address everyone's questions and to ensure that we become comfortable with a most daunting subject. I highly recommend this class to anyone that has a interest in the subject.

This class was extremely well done. The instructor, John, did and excellent job in teaching the material.

This was a great class!

John is one of the best online instructors I have ever had. I would highly recommend him to anyone wanting to learn. He is patient and quick to respond to students’ questions or concerns.

This was an excellent course, as it helped me to become familiar with WP -- something that would not be possible from just reading a book.

Excellent course, excellent instructor. This was my first online course and I didn't know what to expect. I was wondering, "How can you raise your hand if you have a question?" But John answered questions/concerns in a timely, constructive manner, which I appreciated. The course is well-organized. Probably one of the best organized courses I've taken and I've taken a plenty!

Thank you for creating a course that has given me valuable information and helped bring me back to educating myself. This has been an excellent experience and I will tell anyone interested in creating a blog pr website about the course.

I really want to let you know how great I think you've been as an instructor. The depth and length of your responses have been phenomenal. Your knowledge of the subject and your ability to put your students at ease with a subject that overwhelms most of us is exemplary. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I am not now an expert - but I do have the confidence that I can get in there and tackle the world of web design.

This is really the best class Education To Go has to offer. You are the best instructor and you make it fun!

I definitely got what I needed out of this class. My primary objective was to learn how to work with a self-hosted WordPress website/blog that I took over for a client. Previously, I was intimidated by WordPress because I had never worked in it. This class gave me enough knowledge and confidence to dive into the existing WordPress site and start making changes to it, as well as set up my own self-hosted WordPress site which I am integrating with an existing, traditional website. Even though my objective was outside the scope of the class, the material you covered and the conversations in the Discussion area gave me what I was looking for.